I have never been disciplined enough to read through the entire Bible in a year. Don't worry I have read through the entire Bible but it was much more intensive, less of an act of daily discipline. Most of my life I would start with the best of intentions but somewhere around Judges or on the best attempts Chronicles I would call it quits. It was encouraging to me when a friend and pastor of mine gave me his preaching Bible and in the front was one of the calendars, there were check marks next to the daily readings he had completed and they ended about the same time I would usually give up. I guess misery loves company.

This year has been different for me. It really has been a wonder year of daily reading. A big part of it I believe is that I have fallen in love with the Proverbs and I get through everything else knowing that I get to read a Proverb each day.

So yesterday I am sitting in a coffee shop reading 1 Kings 19-22, most of which is about King Ahab. And the thought crossed my mind, what if some random person in the shop said what are you doing. I would tell them I was reading my Bible and they followed up by asking what I was getting out of it. Honestly I would have to tell them absolutely nothing. The story was not connecting with me at all, now lets talk about the Gospel of John, or Proverbs, or Romans and that is my song. But what I just read...nothing.

So why bother? Because there is something there for me to get. It might not be this time when I read or the next, or even the next, but forty years from now before my heart and mind are fertile ground for me to hear the sweet song of Jesus to me through certain parts of the Bible. (Sorry to mix metaphors, hope you follow along). It doesn't seem to even be a problem for me, God's word is not flawed, okay my heart is and I wish I lived fully as Christ now but that is just the reality of my world. So imagine a God who is faithful to his followers even though it may take them the rest of their life to make, "Jesus loves me this I know..." their reality.

I genuinely thought I was over the virus I had a week and a half ago, and now I am back sick. Today is the best I have felt in the last three days, so maybe that is a good sign. The tough part is my sinus were effected in a way that I haven't experienced in years. Hopefully I am on the upswing.

It is challenging to 'run' meetings and interact with people in a way that you are present when you are suffering through sickness. I have had to lead two meetings, one for our Art Camp with All Nations and the other for lacrosse, which I could barely get through my head was so clouded. Then I had a personal interaction that I may have been able to handle much better if I had not been sick.

Last month was overwhelming for our family because of our schedule, this month has been overwhelming for me physically. I ran the marathon on April 30th. I was pretty sore afterward and then hit my shin with the weed wacker. After that I began my on again off again with this virus. I sure hope June has better things in store.

A prayer:

Beginning my day today, with all that is before I am overwhelmed at the task of being an under-shepherd. So before I begin give me peace in my heart. Allow Holy Ghost to guide my in my work, so that I would not busy myself with tasks in order to feel like I have accomplished something for your kingdom. Give me an awareness of what you would have me to do, and allow me to act on that awareness. If the tasks before me are your will let them be done, if not lead me to your heart. My understanding of what you are really doing in my midst is so little. Help it grow, and if it doesn't merely allow me to be apart of what you would have done, not me. Amen

Got hit with a virus. Otherwise this post should have been written a few nights ago. After enjoying a great dinner with our old neighbors on Saturday night, great food (including chicken feet) and great conversation we returned home to find three little guests in front of our house.

Now let me give you the back story. On Tuesday, we were cooking out on our deck. Out of nowhere our neighbor is screaming at her dog. After a few minutes of what sounds like a wrestling match I get a wiff of skunk. The funny part was I was cleaning our table and thought that it was the table at first. After shouting down to my neighbor I found out that her dog had killed a skunk. The dog got sprayed, and the cloud of stink made it's way around a neighborhood.

So on Saturday night three baby skunks are wandering around the front and side of house. The only picture I had in my mind was of Karin, Aidyn, and me getting sprayed trying to get in the house. We just put the car headlights on them and watched. Karin went in to see if our housemate was there, she wasn't. By the time she came back out we were talking to another neighbor who was walking his dog. We tried calling 911 or animal control on his cell phone, but were not getting through. We were able to sneak into our house but now live on edge that we are going to be cornered by the three orphan skunks who are looking for revenge. So much for the urban jungle of Oakland?

One of the cool parts of our new house is not only a great friend now living downstairs from us, but also her little dog. Wilbur or as Aidyn calls him, "WillBird" is a pomeranian. Now the picture here is not actually him, he is much more cute. Normally these dogs are very yappy and terrible with children, at least that is what we have been told, but that is not the case with Wilbur. Each day Aidyn goes downstairs and opens his doggie door, so he can have full access to the back yard all day. The two are wonderful together. Once we moved into our place both Karin and I started to want a dog, having Wilbur around has satisfied that desire and since he isn't ours he is alot less work.

I am flying through, John Stackhouse's book Humble Apologetics. It was required reading for the conference I went to a few weeks ago, but I could not get it through Amazon.com, so I decided to borrow it from Lewis now.

Stackhouse, other than offering a poor explaination of presuppositional apologetics, writes a really nice book. Honestly I think if he understood more of presuppositional apologetics he would realize how similar his approach is.

Anyway my question in reading is how closely related are evangelism and apologetics? For Stackhouse they seem to be exactly the same, only apologetics would have more of an emphasis to those who have believed wrongly or need to be strengthen in their faith. If these two are so closely related why the two catagories? Is it merely an attempt to lessen the impact instead of using a loaded word like evangelism, to use the word apologetics, which to me seems equally as loaded.

So far it has been a great book, again the emphasis is on humility. If that would be our approach to our neighbors I would imagine very different responses.

April was one of the most busy and frustrating months of my life. As I said in a previous blog the events and challenges related to the marathon were merely an illustration for my entire life. May has slowed down alittle. This weekend we had our last lacrosse games, which we lost both, so we ended wit a perfect seson 0-14. Our time hasn't been any easier for Karin either. The challenging part about seasons of life like this is that you are angry that you don't get the time you would want as a couple and yet when you do get it you beat each other up over how you don't get the time.

We are currently going through some deep gut checks right not, it seems that we do that once a year just when we decide whether to raise another year of support or not. Karin is also overwhelmed at all that lies before her in regards to the dance company. Please pray for us and drop us a note if you get a chance.

Preparing to do my first wedding. This Sunday between the morning and evening service Sarah Ball and Adam Corkins are tying the knot. Which is very interesting language since you have that great Christian symbol of the Celtic knot. And also I am preaching on Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, "a threefold cord is not easily broken." Now most of the passage is talked about a two, but then there is this last line about three. What does that have to do with marriage? If you watch Big Love on HBO it's not what you are thinking.

The third that has to be in any truly free, functioning, and fabulous marriage is God. The entire covenant of marriage is a symbol, a great symbol, of the covenant God has made to his those he loves. I am excited, the couple are wonderful and it should be a really great time.

One of the most fun events of us leading up to the wedding was the arrival of my robe. Tuesday it came through the mail, so I put it on and walked around the house. Since neither my wife nor my daughter were paying any attention to me I decided to do my best impersonation of African American preaching, which I am sure was terrible but awfully fun to do. Eventually the girls got with it, offered some Amens!! to appease me and then I could go on hanging up my robe.

As you can imagine I have a few things to write about my experience running a marathon. One thing that was funny but not as gross as I had heard is how everyone (especially men, but also women) are peeing all over the place. While waiting in the staging area, I guess everyone is nervious so they turn descretely away. But throughout the race you see people dart into the woods, and then back out again. Very funny.

Well related to that, at one point we are on a down hill section and conversation started between my brother-in-law, myself and this woman running next to us. At one point the woman asks us what is that stuff on the plastic panels in the water stations. We told her it was Vasiline, of course she didn't know what it was for, so we as appropriately as we could explained that ( I won't go into it here, email me if you need to know). She then went on to explain to us how she thought it was GU (a running product that runners use to boost their energy, sort of a gel gatoraid). She was shocked at how unhygentic that would be grabbing this GU and shoveling it into your mouth. Needless to say my brother-in-law and I found the entire idea funny. How GU was test marketing Vasiline flavored GU. This whole conversations served as another running joke throughout the race.

Thank God it is May:

On Saturday, April 29th, after coaching two lacrosse games the night before, at 10:30 am I left to coach three more games. All of which we lost...it has been a very rough season. From there I left to go into San Francisco, thankfully one of my assistant coaches was able to by me a pizza so I had dinner, to watch Karin perform. She was amazing, truly the highlight of the show. Then at 10PM directly from the show we packed up our car and began the two hour drive to Monterey, CA. I was able to sleep about an hour as Karin made great time finding our hotel without any problem.

It was 12:30AM, I had set out everything I would need for the morning. My running shorts and shirt, sweats, water bottle, shoes, socks, baby lotion, a cliff bar, and perhaps a few other things that I cannot remember at this time. When my alarm went of at 3:30AM I could not believe it, but for just a moment. I jumped into duty mode and got ready. At about 3:45AM I walked next door where my brother-in-law, Jon had my race bag, and sister-in-law, Amy were ready to climb into the car. Any sense of pity I had for what I was doing left when I saw Amy, she was giving us a ride to the bus and not even running in the race, so I sucked it up.

We were dropped off on a street corner in downtown Monterey, at 4:00AM and the streets were alive. People in sweats with hats or skull caps all over the place. We just fell in line with the crowd and next thing I knew we were all at a long like of school buses. For people who have run these races before this whole ritual is normal, for me it would have seemed just as likely to have space aliens show up at some point. It still felt like much more of a dream then reality.

So we boarded the bus. Jon and I sat down, and surprisingly a friend from Oakland named Dee was seated right next to us. This was her twentieth marathon. We talked briefly, and then I went back to thinking about the space aliens that were meeting us.

The staging are was pretty cool. Jon got me some coffee and it did the trick, so I was off the the port-o-let, the line was just long enough for everything to work out great by the time I made it in there. Walking there and back I was able to see Dee again, but surprised not to see any of the aliens.

The race was amazing. Only the Alps could compare to the beauty which we got to enjoy that day. And I would not have been able to enjoy it, or even finish the race, if it were not for my brother-in-law, Jon. Jon was not only a encourager to me but to everyone that was around us. He constantly reminded us to look at why we were doing this. He always had great words for me, and even dropped some knowledge on me. Did you know that the original marathon was only 25 miles long. And the Queen of England is the person who lengthened it to 26.2 because she did not want to go out on the street to see the London marathon, and at the longer distance it would go by Buckingham Palace. So Jon gave me permission to curse the queen at mile 25. My response was you mean I wasn't supposed to be cursing her now. And that really was a wonderful, and fun joke we carried on the entire race.

Somewhere around eight miles there was a two or three mile hill, very challenging. I was able to continue running the entire way, after completing that I knew I could do it. At mile 15 I began to get very emotional, when I told Jon he understood and told me that would be nothing compared to what I would experience finishing the race. You see not only was there 20 weeks of training involved in this race, but I set this goal to run a marathon about five years ago. Also my goal was to complete this before I turn thirty, so I had lots of thoughts and feelings about the birthday that is awaiting me.

I was able to run the entire way...even though at times my run was as fast as Jon's power walking. I finished in 4 hours 24 minutes, 1343 out of 4000. By the time I saw the finish line I had tears running down my face. This truly was third on all time events of my life, marriage and birth of Aidyn being right there.

We made it back home about 4 PM on Sunday, just in time for church. We decided to walk there as a family, knowing that would significantly help me be less sore today. My left knee hurts, and I have some other minor race related pain. Sleeping last night was tough, when I slept I slept well, but everytime I tried to more I woke up. This was an amazing experience, and perhaps some of those 1342 who finished before me were actually the aliens I had been looking for that morning.